AUTHORS – Please be aware of this issue…

End of February Victoria Strauss of the ‘Writer Beware’ blog published an informative and interesting warning about the copyright claiming on edits by a publisher. Thank you very much, Victoria, for all your hard work, your research and your willingness to share all these red flags with us!

It’s not super-common, but I do see it from time to time in contracts that I review, primarily from smaller presses: a publisher explicitly claiming ownership of the editing it provides, or making the claim implicitly by reverting rights only to the original manuscript submitted by the author.

Are there legal grounds for such a claim? One would think that by printing a copyright notice inside a published book, and registering copyright in the author’s name or encouraging the author to do so, publishers are implicitly acknowledging that there is not. It’s hard to know…